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NOTE: CouchDB serves as the foundation of Cloudant's technology stack in the form of BigCouch, an open source variant of CouchDB the company developed to support large-scale, globally distributed applications.

After four years of operating BigCouch in production, Cloudant says it has merged the BigCouch code into the CouchDB codebase, making it possible to manage and replicate data with CouchDB at much larger scale.

"The code merger of BigCouch and Apache CouchDB is good for the open source community and developers that require a scalable web-aware database," said Travell Perkins, CTO at Fidelity Investments.

"As a classically trained computer scientist, I’m interested in the inner workings of my database solutions as much as the practical utility they provide dynamic data and use cases. I've tried a lot of NoSQL solutions over the years with varying degrees of success. After working with the distributed clustering capabilities being built into CouchDB, I think we are approaching the ideal JSON-centric database for enterprise workloads at scale," said Perkins.

NOTE: The open source BigCouch database project was developed in 2008 by the Cloudant cofounders, who had previously been using CouchDB for managing and distributing the petabytes of data generated every second by CERN's Large Hadron Collider.

For the code merger, Cloudant engineers imported sections of BigCouch code into the Apache CouchDB repositories, adapting the database to run in a clustered environment and to better replicate databases across clusters and between data centers.

Going forward, Cloudant says it will cease development of BigCouch in order to participate in the CouchDB community and keep CouchDB and Cloudant clustering functionality in sync.

Cloudant engineers will continue to make cluster-scaling and fault-tolerance enhancements within the CouchDB project and will reuse that code in Cloudant's database service.

"We're continuing work within the Apache project to integrate the clustering technology of BigCouch, but now we've set the stage and are welcoming more project committers to get involved," said Jan Lehnardt, project management committee chair of the Apache CouchDB project.

"Cloudant's work fine-tuning BigCouch database replication at large scale now gives Apache CouchDB a complete strategy for replicating data across distributed systems, whether nodes are Erlang clusters in the same data center or on the other side of the world. Developers have more options for moving data closer to their users and a simpler strategy for synchronizing that data throughout a larger system," added Lehnardt.

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